The Hidden Message

Yesterday I spent the day Enabling Democracy. I acted as a check in judge for the Maryland primary elections.

For the most part it was a very positive experience. From 7 AM to 8 PM the experience was overwhelmingly positive, marred by my own ill health… after about 6 hours my ‘recovery’ from this killer cold was seriously in question. I make due by chugging down my robi-plus-codeine and constantly washing my hands with the purell our school gym location provided. (There was another precinct running their elections out of the Cafeteria).

My fellow judges were very pleasant this time around. We had two high school students acting as check in judges. One of our chief judges owns a Bed and Breakfast in Paris. Everyone was happy to be there and fun to be around (with the possible exception of myself and my scary cough). There were some minor glitches and hitches. No personality issues this time around, but one of my co-workers was in the midst of a professional and personal crisis, the school heating system wasn’t equipped to handle the constant opening and closing of outside doors, and many of the unaffiliated voters would have liked to vote in the Democratic primary. One went so far as to complain that he ‘should be able to vote for president’ even though he wasn’t in the party, and was unhappy when informed that he’d have his chance in November like everyone else. It was the judges, rather than the voters, who seemed most concerned about the lack of paper trail, but we all agreed that the system was running smoothly. We had a League of Women Voters observer tell us it was the best run polling place she had ever seen.

Because it was a primary election we were tracking how many voters from each party we got. I live in an overwhelmingly Democratic district. After the first hour we had about 150 Democratic party voters, and less than a dozen (each) Republican and Unaffiliated/Other voters. (There are four recognized parties in Maryland, but neither Greens nor Libertarians are given state funded primaries). The only non-partisan race was for Board of Education. By the end of the day there were 550+ Democratic voters, 150+ Republican voters, and 30 something Other voters counted. I’m sure we would have had a much larger turnout if the weather hadn’t gotten grim. Even so, we had a final turnout of about 35%.

There were all sorts of interesting things going on. Most of the gain in Republican voters came after 5 PM. All the white women wearing furs or diamonds were registered Republican, and they came in in the morning. The most expensive suits were worn by white male Republicans or gentlemen of color Democrats. There were very few women of color wearing fur, but they voted in the Democratic primary. The afternoon/evening voters were working class, regardless of color or party affiliation. We didn’t have the after work rush we’d expected, and we understood that the roads were terrible.

There were lots of people who expressed dissappointment in not voting in the Democratic primaries but most of them understood why (three weeks before the primary was the cut off for party changing). We had a number of individuals change party affiliation to Democrat and choose not to vote. We had one Democrat to Republican party switch, and I would have loved to learn the story behind that but, naturally, didn’t ask.

Things started to go wonky at about 7:40. Continue reading →

Filed under: politics | Tagged: bureaucracy., codeine, cough, elections, maryland primaries, party politics, weather | 4 Comments »